Little Mountain (7 page)

         Besson dropped a folder on Sam’s desk. “Not much here yet,” he said. DeVito called Besson the man of ten thousand freckles, because Besson’s fiancee supposedly counted them all. Probably true, because Besson grinned a lot.

         “Got any prints we can use?” Sam asked.

         “You give me some suspects, maybe I do. Looks like the family’s prints all over the place, what else would you expect? I think everybody but you and the pope left prints there. You need to give me somebody to focus on. Victim’s
wife say
the shooter was Asian?”

         “No, she didn’t. Maybe he didn’t go inside, but I’d just as soon check it out.
How about the victim?”

         “We’re sending his prints to the
feds,
I’ve got nothing on Bin Chea here.” Sam gave Besson a list of names to check, including Nawath and other neighbors of Bin Chea. Then Besson went back to his desk.

         “Hey, Hot Dog,” Fitchie said. “M.E.’s supposed to call this afternoon. I said when he’s ready he should call you direct.” Dark circles of sweat showed under his arms. Traces of mayo clung to the corners of his lips. “Good news, by the way. Chief’s told the state police we’re in the best position to handle this, having a Cambodian investigator. They’re willing to stand back for now.”

         Sam laughed.
“Cambodian?
I’m a citizen here.
American as apple pie.”

         “American as mango pie, I’d guess.” The glint in Fitchie’s eyes said that he was teasing. A lot of personal troubles weighed on Fitchie’s mind, and it was good that he could joke about anything. “Anyway, Chief wants his money’s worth.”

         “I’ll give him my best.”

         “You’d better. Lieutenant More or Less will be like that Venus fly trap of his, you see it? Give you some sticky shit to land on,
then
snap!
You be sure and disappoint him, okay?”

         “I have nothing against the Lieutenant,” he said. “Got to have a quick sandwich, finish this report,
then
follow up on Mrs. Chea. She
okay
to see yet?”

         “Yeah, I guess she’s calm now. She was pretty freaked out last night, though.”

         “She went through an awful--”

        
“Yeah, a bitch of a time.
Not as bad as her husband, of course. Look, I ran down the numbers on the phone bill.
Got fifteen names, plus a couple of one-minutes to a Long Beach pay phone.”

         “Wrong numbers, you think?”

         “Who knows at this point? We have the addresses, but we can’t assume anything. You know what they say when you assume?” Fitch printed on the back of a “While You
Were
Out” message sheet:

         ASS U ME

         “It makes an ass out of you and me,” Fitch said.

         Sam laughed. Julie would like that one--well, he liked it. “Who are these people he called? Maybe one of them has a rap sheet. And we should find the pay phone address on a map of Long Beach,
then
see who’s nearby. If it’s the same neighborhood as the other numbers--”

         “Yeah, that would tell us something.
And what about insurance policies?
Who benefits from his death? I’ll check that out.”

         “Mrs. Chea says she’s the sole surviving relative. Speaking of soles--”

         “We were?”

         “I was thinking about the shoes Chea wore when he died.
Must have been wearing his oldest pair.”
Even the little girl Sopheary mentioned shoes. Cute kid, a mild nuisance, but so what?

        
“Yeah?
Who doesn’t have old shoes?”

        
“Just another detail.
I’ll finish up here and see what I can learn from Mrs. Chea.”

         “She’s in room 5115. You’ll have company in her hospital room, by the way. Patrolman McGinnis is there on chaperone duty. Chief thought whoever came for the old man might decide to come back for his widow. Actually, I sent her. Wilkins tried to veto it, then the Chief came along and overheard. He thought it was a good idea. Shit, man, the look I got from Wilkins!”

         “I don’t blame Wilkins. Between cops laid off, on vacation, testifying in court, lying in traction from car wrecks--”

        
“Callahan, right.
They say he’ll be back to work tomorrow. With all that, there just isn’t enough blue to go around.”

Sam sat at his desk and ate a bowl of rice and pork, leftovers from last night’s dinner. His eyes focused on his paperwork, but his mind focused on Bin Chea. He had once known a Bin somebody. “Bin Chea” could have been right, but “Comrade Bin” was all he remembered for sure. The man Sam once knew had run the death camp at Little Mountain, where surnames counted for nothing. But the man’s face was burned into the folds of his brain forever.
High cheekbones behind healthy cheeks, fading smallpox scars, a thin smile that spoke nothing of the thoughts behind it.
Eyes full of intelligence.
Kindness.
Malice.
Indifference.
That said you will live, you will die, or you matter less than the mud under his feet. But his eyes were just a mask of his true thoughts. Comrade Bin could lie with his mouth shut.

         When they found the killer, Sam might find out if there was any connection. Maybe the killer was that fellow Khem Chhap. What few details Sam had heard so far didn’t specifically fit what he knew about Comrade Bin, especially the story about the skull used as a flower pot. Could have been a memory seen through the haze of 90-proof gin. And as Li Chang said, they were rumors anyway.

         When people whispered about Comrade Bin in the camp, they only speculated about his surname. If only Sam had heard it once and known it for certain, he would remember it like his own name. Even if Bin Chea turned out to be Comrade Bin, they would put the shooter in jail.
Hard time in a maximum security rat hole like the state penitentiary at Walpole, when maybe he should get a medal.

         Sam had spent years trying to get Little Mountain out of his mind. Now this murder brought it back again. A dozen years ago in a Cambodian monsoon, he had struggled to live through the day.

Fierce rains had pounded his body that afternoon. He barely saw Boreth and Vacheran, teenagers like himself, who motioned to him from underneath a
kapok
tree near the edge of the mango orchard. Like Sambath, they wore only black trousers and no shirts, and their skin sunk in among their ribs. Their black hair was slickened by the rain, their toes buried in the mud. Vacheran’s eyes were set deep inside dark circles in his face and seemed to stare past Sambath at nothing. Boreth made way as Sambath scrambled under the tree and sat on his haunches to wait out the worst of the downpour while he looked past the lake shore through the gray sheets of rain. All day, they had carted bodies from the field to the lake.

         To his left, the old school building was only a smudge in his eyes. To his right, the lake stretched out a few hundred meters and dissolved in the mist that hid Little Mountain. The rumble he heard might have been thunder, or the bulldozer that pushed its way back and forth on the other side of the lake, or it might have been his insides. What did he really hear? What did he really see? It was hard to tell anymore.

         He stared out towards the lake while his insides churned like the ocean. His head felt as though a stone cutter had chipped away at his forehead with a hammer and chisel. The surface of the lake was a moonscape of watery craters, an archipelago with human islands. A skull rose up, its temples caved in, black eyes peering out to see what had disturbed its rest. Had it been above water all the time? Sambath hadn’t noticed. The empty sockets looked directly at him, accusing.
You.
You!
He heard a scream above the rain, a familiar sound, his own voice.

        
“Sh-h-h.
Be quiet, comrade.” Boreth’s hand clamped firmly on his mouth. “
Angka’s
ears are everywhere, even in the rain. Let’s be like our friend Vacheran, who holds his screams in his heart.”

         Of course Boreth was right.
Angka
was The Organization, and Sambath never knew whom to trust except for these two.
Angka
seemed to hear everything everyone said, as well as many things no one said--they heard what they wanted to hear. They did what they wanted to do.

         Perhaps Vacheran’s mute witness was the answer. If he could not speak, how could
Angka’s
spies accuse him of speaking ill?

         They had no right to break from work. Sambath gripped the wooden cart and pulled it through the mud. Boreth and Vacheran had to push from behind and make sure no bodies fell off. Together they moved slowly toward the old school yard, where a rusty bulldozer rattled back and forth.

         When the bulldozer driver threw up, Comrade Bin motioned to Sambath. “Come help our Comrade,” Bin said, his eyes full of concern. “You take his place while he goes to the hospital.” No one survived the hospital.

         Sambath’s chest muscles burned as he pulled himself onto the tread. He sucked in a breath that tore at his lungs,
then
climbed into the steel seat. The stench of rotted flesh drifting from the pond was almost more than he could bear. In front of him lay a tangle of bodies, motionless except for the occasional spasm that a comrade silenced with a rock. Guards stood by with their automatic rifles. Comrade Bin waved impatiently, so Sambath dropped the blade and shifted into gear. He wanted to drive over Comrade Bin, flatten him with the treads. Maybe that would help him to feel better for an instant before the guards’ bullets ripped through his body. But this machine could never move fast enough, and he probably could not kill even one soldier before he died. A burning bile rose in his throat, and he forced it back down.
I am such a squealing little pig, such a coward. But they say they know everything. What if they can read my mind?
Then don’t think.
He wiped away all thoughts, shut down his mind and accelerated. The bulldozer lurched forward, and as a comrade jumped out of the way, Sambath pushed the bodies into the shallows of the lake.

“Sam. Hey, Sam, snap to. Line one.” Sam looked at Fitchie, puzzled for a moment, until Fitchie nodded toward the blinking light on the telephone. “Your wake-up call, Hot Dog.”

        
“Sambath Long here.”
He folded his lunch bag and put it in the desk drawer.

         “Hell-o, Detective Long.
Doctor Katsios here.”
Demetrios Katsios. Cheerful
man,
loved his work.

         “Dr. Katsios, you--”

         “I called about the shooting victim.”

        
“In the Heights.
Bin Chea.”

        
“Right.
Let’s see, some of this you might know. Scalloped shot pattern, gunpowder stippling on the face. Bits of plastic wadding embedded in the skin. That’s consistent with a sawed-off shotgun at three, maybe four feet. Doesn’t blow your head off at that range, you know. To do that, you’ve got to--”

         Sam held the phone away from his ear. Don’t tell me this. I’m not a rookie. Just tell me what I need.

         “--
bounce
around inside the skull, causing massive--”

         “Dr. Katsios, please tell me what you found out about Bin Chea.”

         “That’s what I’m doing. When those pellets can’t exit the skull--”

         “I’m in
a hurry
--”

        
“All right.
Nothing unusual on the external.
The subject was five-six, 140 pounds. Had dentures, only three teeth
of his own
.
Nicotine on his fingers, dirt under the nails.
The internal showed a malignancy on both lungs. This fellow was already terminal. If the killer had waited six months, he might have saved a couple of shells.”